Bar and Grill

This 1941 painting by artist Jacob Lawrence titled Bar and Grill depicts the reality of Jim Crow segregation in New Orleans. A floor-to-ceiling wall divides a drinking establishment into two separate spheres. The white customers, at left, bear some facial details and are cooled by a ceiling fan; in contrast, the Black customers, at right, have neither a fan to cool them nor any distinguishing features.

As a child during the Civil War, Lawrence's maternal grandmother escaped enslavement by walking from Prince William County to Alexandria. Two of her siblings—one three years old and the other only twelve hours old—died and were buried in the city's Freedmen's Cemetery. Lawrence's parents migrated to Atlantic City, where the artist was born. As a teenager he moved with his mother and sister to Harlem, where he developed his artistic talent and eventually became a nationally renowned painter. Though Lawrence spent most of his life in the north, he felt a kinship with the south, noting in 1961, "If you weren’t born in the South, your parents were. Your life had a whole Southern flavor; it wasn’t an alien experience to you even if you had never been there.”